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Month: November 2015
The Third Annual Day Lecture: Buddhist Lust and Consumerism
On September 24, 2015, Dr. Jolyon Thomas gave the third annual Day Lecture with his talk “The Buddhist Virtues of Raging Lust and Crass Materialism.” The Day Lecture was generously established by friends and family of the late Zach Day, a graduate of our Department, to honor his memory, and is now an annual event thanks to the memorial fund named in his honor. If you missed out on the lecture, the video of the event is now here! The […]
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A Good Book with Prof. Jacobs
The latest episode in our A Good Book series has just been uploaded to Vimeo! This video features Prof. Steve Jacobs and his discussion of a particular Torah scroll that was recovered from Nazi collections and has now been brought to Tuscaloosa’s Temple Emanu-El. You can read more about the story in this Tuscaloosa News article. A Good Book with Prof. Jacobs from UA Religious Studies. […]
Calculating the Other: ISIS and Paris
After a lovely dinner at a restaurant the other night, with my mom and husband, we came home, checked our cell phones, and were consumed by the unfolding story about the attacks in Paris. In the flurry of articles trying to make sense of the situation, “Crimes Jihadists Will Sentence You to Death For,” caught my attention. Its argument mirrored many of the discussions that were happening on people’s Facebook walls – there’s something so distinct, so different about ISIS, […]
Welcome to Atlanta…
Many of the faculty in REL are soon hitting the road, heading east to Atlanta, to attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) — our main professional association here in the US. While our southeast region also meets in Atlanta (in the Spring), this is the national meeting, which takes place each November, and attracts thousands of scholars from around the world.REL A lot of things happen at these meetings — some of the faculty are […]
Marketing and the Academic Study of Religion
What connects red lipstick, racecars, and health care? The study of religion, of course! (Well, sort of.) Khara Cole, a 2013 graduate with a double major in Religious Studies and Public Relations, has found the skills that she developed in Religious Studies particularly important, as she designs products and their implementation for a health insurance company. She returned to campus last week to talk about her experiences working in the corporate world. The tasks of writing persuasive business proposals and […]
See You There
Are you chairing a Department of Religious Studies at a public university? If so, this group at our annual conference (taking place in a couple weeks in Atlanta) might be for you. It’s an informal group and this year I’ve been invited to lead a discussion on contingent faculty. But I hope that in our brief time we can also discuss shared interests and, even better, ways to systematize future meetings. For we’ve all got to have certain challenges in […]
Justifying Actions
By Ashley Crawford Ashley Crawford is from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is a junior majoring in Marketing with a minor in Psychology. Have you ever played the game telephone when you were younger? Someone starts out whispering a sentence in someone’s ear and they whisper it in someone else’s until it gets to the last person and by then it is completely different from the original sentence. This game was fun because it was always interesting to hear how different everyone […]
REL 360 Showing Kumare: The True Story of a False Prophet
In this fourth and final installment of REL 360‘s semester-long movie screenings, we’ll be following American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi as he enacts a social experiment in the hopes of revealing the irrationality of blind faith. Impersonating an Indian guru, he travels through Arizona gathering followers from all walks of life. Though designed to exhibit the absurdity of blind faith, his experiment may reveal greater spiritual truths than he had set out to unearth. In order to learn what he discovers about human nature, you’ll […]
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An Interview with Dr. Jolyon Thomas Part 2
The conclusion to our interview with Dr. Jolyon Thomas, our third Day Lecturer, is now ready! Don’t miss this final installment, where he discusses his current projects and gives insight on where he feels the field of religious studies in pop. culture is going. A Few Moments with Jolyon Thomas Part 2 from UA Religious Studies. If you missed the first part of the interview, you can catch it here. Stay tuned for Dr. Thomas’ Day Lecture, coming soon! […]